Madra Learning

Unlocking support team potential with Desk.com

Students aren’t the only ones who get busy at back-to-school time; that mayhem also affects the companies that make the books, supplies, and technology for students, or anyone else that supports them. Like Madra Learning, an educational platform that helps students succeed in challenging subjects. At the start of each semester, the company is inundated with registration-related issues. They started out by managing support through email, but the system couldn’t keep up as they grew. “We help students unlock their potential,” says Jeremiah Jones, Madra’s Co-Founder. “We needed to unlock our own.”

Increasing speed and measurement

Before Desk.com, Madra had a hard time figuring out which customers had already been taken care of during busy times, and it was challenging to coordinate internally on who was working on various issues. “We’d occasionally lose track of a question, or have multiple support personnel respond to the same customer,” says Jones. “That’s when we knew we needed Desk.com.”

Madra chose Desk.com for its easy-to-use interface and rich feature set. Now the company’s three support agents use it to manage support requests from email and social channels; macros, templates, and bulk updating functionality help them quickly respond to common questions or tackle more complex ones. The company uses tags and custom fields to analyze requests and monitor support team performance. They can see which aspects of its service drive the most customer inquiries and where they need to focus more attention in development. They can also see which customer segments have the highest support costs and identify the most valuable ones to focus on. Data from Desk.com also helps drive development priorities, such as new features that will streamline the registration process and make it easier for new students to get started.

A support team that makes the grade

Offering an exceptional experience is important to Madra, so support costs are a significant part of the company’s expenditures. Data from Desk.com has helped the company’s support team become more efficient, and agents can now handle more than five times more cases than they did in the past — without sacrificing quality. In fact, time-to-respond and time-to-close have been reduced by more than 50% across some channels. The company can focus on growing its customer base without needing to make big changes to its support infrastructure.

Jones adds, “With Desk.com, our small support staff appears and functions like an enterprise-level support organization.”